How I Came to Value Food and Family

For me, and clearly for my mother as well, good food is synonymous with many other positive, life changing experiences and philosophies.  Family, environmental sustainability, health, community, social responsibility, and happiness to name a few.  I’ve always known this to be true and over the years it has become more and more paramount and apparent in my life.  In interviewing my mother and explicitly addressing the evolution of her experiences with parenting and food, these foundational concepts were made explicit and laid bare.

Mostly focusing on her experiences with me and my sisters when we were young children, my mother expressed her gratitude for having children who were not picky and thus easy to please.  She recalls us playing the “If you could only eat 5 foods for the rest of your life, what would they be?”-game with us when we were quite young.  I was pleased when she reported that my response was often green beans and pears.  While assuring me that my love for good food was intrinsic, when I asked her if she thought pickiness in children was a result of the behavior of parents, she declined to take any credit for my predispositions.  Instead, she emphasized the importance of structure in our lives and how, by engaging us in conversation about what we wanted to eat, she involved us in our own experience with food.  She said that while she took into account what we wanted, her initial years as a parent forced her to think of food in terms of what was healthy.

After my parent’s divorce when I was 4, she related that the main shift in our eating habits was that we finally were able to eat with her.  As a young child, my father would work late and so my mother would eat with him, feeding us our “kids meal” at a time more befitting our internal body clocks.  So when she began eating with us, in her own home, we began eating “grown-up” food. Couscous salad with garbanzo beans, cucumber, and tomato, pasta salads with veggies and sausage, soups, and most importantly lots of vegetables.

It was interesting to her my mother discuss her childhood experiences with family dinners, as every dinner was family dinner.  In a similar way, I was raised with the understanding that dinner was an affair where everyone sat down together exactly when dinner was ready (no waiting five minutes to finish whatever task was at hand).  I believe this instilled in me a strong association between family and food.  To this day, the two are inseparable.  You cement relationships, create family, and celebrate connections through sharing food.  Over the years I’ve observed that once  you know someone you can determine whether or not family dinners were a part of their upbringing.  In a way it has became one of the ways I measure people for if they were raised to value family the way I do, we have a solid basis of understanding.

My mother’s attentiveness and awareness to the needs of her children and their relationship to food has served me well over the years.  I could never thank her enough for, whether her efforts were conscious or intuitive, she has instilled in me a passion and love that is enduring and one that has shaped how I view my relationship with the earth, with other people, and with myself.  So, thank you, Mom.

Learning to Love: Breakfast

I’ve never been a breakfast person.  Not because I don’t like breakfast, but because I’m not a morning person.  Normally, by the time I’m up and ready to eat, it’s past breakfast time (often well past).  I’ve never felt like losing thirty extra minutes of sleep in order to make yourself a delicious morning meal was time well spent.  Consequently, breakfast for me is quick, easy, and rather insubstantial.

However, I love breakfast foods.  As a sweet-tooth kinda gal, I’ve always loved fluffy pancakes slathered with warm maple syrup, crisp waffles with piles of sugar soaked strawberries and clouds of airy whipped cream, and steaming muffins with berries or chocolate chips hidden like buried gems amongst springy, moist flesh. Anything with sugar and I loved it.  As the years went on, I began to love the more savory breakfasts.  Huevos Rancheros with those deliciously earthy black beans and the promise of salsa, omelettes with every vegetable under the sun mixed with gooey cheese and salty ham, hashbrowns with crisp brown outer layers and soft, salty insides.  Clearly the problem isn’t that I don’t like breakfast foods, it’s just that I have a hard time with mornings.

And then I fell in love.

It’s amazing how things change when you fall in love.  Suddenly, breakfast became my favorite meal because I got to share it with him.  The act of communion that the cooking, sharing, eating, and cleaning up of breakfast entailed colored the promise of the day all kinds of shades of rosy red and sunkissed orange.  With him, breakfast became an expression of affection, of silent connection, of the desire to share our experiences of the day before they even occurred.  An unspoken ritual of preparation.

And the best part about it was that he cooked for me.  When he cooked, I could almost feel the love radiating off of him, as if the heat from the stove were just a physical manifestation of his appreciation.  When he cooked, he was paying homage to our relationship.  He was not the kind of man who knew how to tell you he loved you, often times even had a hard time showing it, but in the mornings, I knew.

And he fed me so well! Mounds of fluffy scrambled eggs, carefully partitioned and prepared grapefruit, perfectly toasted English muffins with butter seeping into the crusty brown cracks, sautéed onions and spinach and bell pepper, home-fries crisped to perfection, melted sharp cheese, pesto from the night before, burritos wrapped in tin foil for the sad days we couldn’t sit down to enjoy one another, yogurt and berries and granola for those days he felt like a healthy kick in the pants was needed, disgusting smoothies with boosters and algae and all those gross things that make you strong and happy, simple slices of tomato, coffee so strong and black it punched holes right through the fuzziness of early mornings.  Everything prepared with careful assuredness and attentiveness to detail.

I was proud to watch him, to eat his food, to bask in the products of his love and know that it was for me.  Every flick of his wrist as he tossed the contents of a pan, every snick of his knife hitting the cutting board, every hiss of the kettle as water boiled was for us.  So I would sit and watch and eat and know he loved me.  That his love sustained me.

Yes, I would say that breakfast is my favorite meal.